The broken Wifi business model’s latest casualty: MetroFi

You’ve seen this said time and time again on this blog, if you want to do get Wifi working in your city either the city needs to build it using existing funds to do an existing job like meter reading or internal IT, or they need to stay out all together. Successful Wifi networks either public or private have been built as funded projects either with a specific job to do or as a community supported project, not as franchises to be taxed and micro managed. More proof lies in the demise of MetroFi.

In what is proving to be yet another high-profile Metro Wi-Fi failure, MetroFi, a San Jose-based startup that raised over $15 million from Sevin Rosen & August Capital, is close to shutting down, according to WiFi NetNews and MuniWireless, two blogs that follow the MuniFi industry closely.

MetroFi is trying to sell its citywide Wi-Fi networks in Portland (Oregon), Aurora and Naperville (Illinois) and Santa Clara, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Foster City and Concord (California). MetroFi founder, Chuck Haas, says he is also exploring the sale of MetroFi itself to a third party. (GigaOm)